Happy Fourth?

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro
by Frederick Douglass
From a speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852 

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license;
your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted
impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your
religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast,
fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation
on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than
are the people of the United States, at this very hour.